News that developers prefer XP, Linux not all bad for Vista

More bad news for Windows Vista: just 8 percent of North American developers …

Only 8 percent of developers are targeting Windows Vista according to a new report from analysts Evans Data Corporation. 49 percent of developers are developing for Vista's soon-to-be-discontinued predecessor, Windows XP, and even Linux is beating Vista, with some 13 percent of development focused on the open-source OS.

The headline finding of the report, compiled from a biannual survey of North American developers, could point at continued problems for Microsoft. More than a year after its release, Vista is still failing to make significant inroads into the enterprise, with businesses preferring to stick with the tried-and-trusted Windows XP. John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, claims that developers are taking a "wait-and-see" approach to Vista, as "the new operating system has had more than its share of problems"; driver issues, software incompatibility, and steep hardware demands.

The predictions for next year are more positive, with Vista expected to rise to 24 percent, though this will still be behind XP, expected to be the target for 29 percent of development. This points to a much brighter future for Vista. More worrying for Microsoft will be the inroads that Linux is making. Although the gains predicted for Linux are far more modest than those for Vista—Evans Data estimates that 15 percent of developers will be writing software for Linux in 2009—they do indicate that developers are slowly, but surely turning away from Windows.

The situation with Vista might not be as bad as the numbers suggest, however. Targetting Vista and XP is not an either/or proposition; almost all software written for XP will run unmodified and without problem on Vista. If developers refrain from certain practices that are strongly discouraged in XP and outright prohibited in Vista, the two OSes are to all intents and purposes completely compatible. 49 percent of developers may be developing for XP, but the majority of them will equally be developing for Vista, even if not deliberately.

Further, the concerns raised by Evans Data may be overstated. The hardware compatibility situation has also greatly improved since Vista's release; there are many more drivers available now, and almost all hardware of the past few years should work without problem in the new OS.

In truth, the problem with Vista is not Vista itself, but rather Windows XP. When XP was released in 2001, it too had steep hardware demands, poor compatibility, as well as inferior performance (especially for users migrating from Windows 95/98/Me). Over XP's extended lifetime, the hardware caught up and the vendors started supporting XP properly; the result is that XP is now small and fast with excellent compatibility. Vista does provide real benefits over XP, especially on the security front, but in spite of the lip-service paid by many organizations to security, this has not been sufficient to cause the large-scale migrations that Microsoft would have liked.

That could change soon. Microsoft will cease shipping Windows XP at the end of this month, which should—belatedly—kick start the transition to Vista. With the major hurdles standing in the way of its adoption gone, and with its biggest competitor killed off, Vista might finally begin to flourish. There is one fly in the ointment; if businesses are still not convinced that Vista is ready for prime time, they can use their downgrade rights to continue use to XP long after the June 30th cut-off.